Scipion Capital, an investment manager specializing in self-liquidating short-term commodity trade finance, has made three new senior hires to further strengthen its legal division, on-the-ground operations and corporate governance.

Myriam Ly, international financial lawyer, has joined as General Counsel to oversee all of the group’s legal matters.

Ly is a dual qualified lawyer admitted to both the Paris Bar and the roll of solicitors in England and Wales.
She has worked in the field of finance law for leading law firms in London, Paris and Geneva for the past nine years.

Before joining Scipion, Ly was a senior associate at Schulte Roth & Zabel International, where her practice focused on the establishment and structuring of hedge funds.

Trade and Structured Finance professional Neil Tuckwell joins Scipion as Head of Operations.

He will be overseeing the operational aspects of the company’s commodity financing business and brings with him almost 30 years’ experience in the commodity trade finance sphere.

Tuckwell was previously Senior Transaction Management Officer in the Middle Office at FBN Bank (UK).

Prior to that he spent eight years working at soft commodity trading companies including Armajaro Trading Limited and Tate & Lyle Sugars Europe, where he was involved in a number of structured and vanilla trade finance operations covering cocoa, coffee and sugar.

David Butler, leading advisor to the hedge fund community in London, joins as Non-Executive Director of Scipion Capital.

Known globally for his services to the industry since 1997, Butler worked as a Senior Tax Manager at Deloitte and EY before being appointed Partner at RSM Robson Rhodes London.

He founded Kinetic Partners, a service provider focused on the alternative asset management industry, in 2005, offering risk management, audit, regulatory, tax, forensic, insolvency and consulting services from eight locations around the world.

Since retiring from Kinetic Partners in 2013, Butler has taken up appointments on the boards of several hedge fund management firms, as well as other financial service firms, providing independent governance and advice.

Scipion said these developments are in line with the firm’s substantial growth over the last two years, in which it has also added to its investment, marketing, investor relations and compliance teams – and transitioning to a much more institutionalized structure, as a response to the fast growing investor interest in the global commodity trade industry.

The significant inflows into Scipion’s commodities trade finance strategies have led the firm’s executives to engineer an overarching push to bolster their expertise and teams across the business – which most recently included the creation of a high level Advisory Board and a focus on the international business development through the hire of a Head of Marketing and Sales.

Nicolas Clavel, CIO of Scipion, said Scipion is now an established leader in the non-bank financial institution sector specializing in commodities.

“We are getting traction for our strategies with a more and more diversified range of investors, both in terms of type and region of origin. In this context, we aim to leverage our track record and success to give the company the structure its fast-growing size now requires,” he said.

“We believe this will be partly achieved by attracting the best talent across our core areas of expertise, particularly governance and operations: Myriam’s high level international legal experience, Neil’s long lasting embedment within trade financing spheres, and David’s invaluable hedge fund sector track record and focus on independent governance will be key – and complementary - elements of a highly efficient structure, supporting the company’s continuing growth,” he added.

Scipion provides secured lending via short-term self-liquidating loans to finance the delivery, production, and/or processing of non-perishable commodities as export, import, or intra Africa.